Dernieres Nouvelles d’Alsace (FR) – 2007The Danish theatre company Hotel Pro Forma dematerialises the myth of Orpheus to the point of abstraction. A pure object of contemplation. All that is left is the essence: staggering music and breathtaking beauty.
– Jean-Michel LahireRead the full review here

The Independent Riga (LV) – 2007Operation : Orfeo demonstrates the metamorphosis of opera in the 21st century in its most positive way. The performance is transformed by the Latvian Radio Choir into a manifesto of the most powerful musical instrument – the human voice. The Danish dancer Lisbeth Sonne Andersen sculpts her fluid motions. Operation : Orfeo is a world class show.
– Laima MellenaRead the full review here

Sidney Morning Herald (AU) – 1998This gut-wrenching beautiful work… teases out key elements of an ancient story, elaborating them into hypnotic patterns based on the true irreducible fundamentals of the theatrical process: bodies moving in time and space…It is a great work of art which renders the critic useless…Without a doubt one of the greatest experiences I have ever had in the theatre.
– James WaitesRead the full review here

Le Soir (FR) – 1995An intelligent and fascinating delirium of mysterious beauty. With the myth of Orpheus, Hotel Pro Forma has arranged the essential. It is a stringent construction created by a magnificent optical concept which transforms and occasionally reduces the room to a complete two-dimensional space…These Danes are unsurpassed.
– Michèle Friche and Jean-Marie WynantsRead the full review here

Operation : Orfeo is performance as ritual. Based on the myth of Orpheus and Euridice it is composed as a scenic sequence of images with formalised movements drawn through light and supported by symphonic singing. The performance is absorbed in oppositions: darkness and light, life and death, sound and silence. As a visual opera the performance explores deeper evocations of the ancient myth in its inevitably emergent associations of preconscious forms.

As the myth is well known the storyline has no need to be told in detail, but may well serve as a dramaturgic course. Operation : Orfeo is divided into three parts. Darkness prevails in the first part and refers to the descent of Orpheus. From the dim clair-obscur of the second part persons appear and recall the ascent of Orpheus. Strong light emerges when the third part begins and reflects the loss of Euridice as a memory laid bare. A sequence of images follow, an interchange between the total illusion of two-dimensional plane and three-dimensional depth.

The set’s framing both bounds the finite and is the gateway to the infinite. Within this frame usual modes of seeing and perceiving are suspended or displaced. The perspective switch is in co-existing forms between that of a giant canvas and one of monumental depth. The tiniest items can be seen with the clarity of magnification, but are dwarfed by the whole. The known and the unknown are brought into new alignments to create poetic assonance – devoid of purposeful meaning in its statement, yet filled with meaning in its experience. Throughout, the performers themselves transform the composition of space as they move like elements of an animated painting or sculpture. The minimalist actions of the singers carefully relate to the music but do not interpret it. Thus the two different languages of movement and music communicate in a subtle way without illustrating each other.

The lone dancer is the only figure who may be seen to represent the narrative of the myth, though she cannot be taken to represent any particular character – she could be Orpheus, and she could be Euridice. She could indeed be the storyteller herself.

Like the visual elements, the music creates a play of difference through oppositions that entice and illuminate each other: the tenuous and the voluminous, the sporadic and the unifying, the soloist and the chorus.

The minimalism of John Cage is staged in a full-blooded choral, while the music by Bo Holten, inspired by the Renaissance choir and specifically composed for this production, is lush and redolent. The famous aria Che faro sensa Euridyce from Gluck´s opera Orpheus and Euridice appears as a classical quotation, an icon, a remembrance.

The cast consists of twelve singers, a mezzo soprano soloist, a solo dancer and the conductor.

Extracts from the libretto by Ib Michael (Translated by Barbara Haveland).
This libretto comprises two texts by Ib Michael: The indented passages are taken from his collection of poems, Himmelbegravelsen (Sky Burial). The remainder of the text was commissioned for this production.

Wind through to one face in a crowd,
dark with forgetting –

An underwater current
sets her hand to waving
and she sways in silhouette

She is but one drowned dancer
among many
who have forsaken choreography
and have entered into silence
where the sunlight sails
on a film of mineral salts

As yet still caught inside your lungs,
a pocket of air confined by your ribs
As yet the telegraph still crackles
within its own closed circuit where

the gills of the heart palpate
as yet her name is still dawning on your lips

– echo of that name
you bound in music
e’er she fell
from your face –

With your vast mouth you colour
you colour the water red
as you mime her name
and feel the salt in your eye.
You snatch at silhouetted forms
Only to be brushed by riven silk
brushed a shiver from the soul
as the shoul turns away –

You raise her up from the ocean floor
dancing

with face averted

she pitches, heavy as a sleeper
in your arms
Strung out in the air
between circling silhouettes
with wind
rushing through feathers

The two leading birds
hold everything spellbound
the sun refuses to rise
the day hangs at rest in its heaven
no shadows race
across the mountain tops
they too await
the butcher’s cry

As he cuts off the head
the faintness again
face to face with features
with eyes and an open mouth
so staggeringly weightless
without its body
——–

According to legend
a myrtle wreath bobs off into the dusk
the concert grands play, sable-sailed
with masts by the hundred the ships go down

——–
On the shoreline a seagull’s raucous cry
sounds across white stones
sleep and forgetting in symphony
capsuled in amber caskets

Operation : Orfeo is a musical work that draws on the basic principles of visual art. A reconceptualisation of the opera genre. Causal and dramaturgic sequence in libretto and music is replaced by a series of tableaux and compositions informed by purely visual and auditive principles rather than by dramatic modes of narration. The performance is a visual interpretation which comes to rediscover the basic elements of traditional opera.

The myth about Orpheus’ journey to the underworld is not retold in a direct way. Rather, it serves as a dramaturgical device with the classical division of the myth into three parts informing a series of images translated into a contemporary scenic language. It hints at the mythic narrative without ever illustrating it. The three parts correspond with the stages in which the events of the mythic narrative unfold: the descent, the ascent and the loss – visualised in images of light and shadow, flat surface and depth.

The libretto is a sensuous flow of words performed as symphonic a capella singing. Like a glowing poem it dives into the fluid, colourful and shady underworld of the ocean to re-emerge at the Roof of the World in the middle of a death cult being performed.

The music of the performance creates a play of difference through oppositions that entice and illuminate each other: the tenuous and the voluminous, the sporadic and the unifying, the soloist and the chorus.

The performance is simple like a surgical incision and complicated like major surgery.